They both relate to a single event (which was the justification hinted at for moving) on the same airline.

I'm the one that made the decision that it belongs in Civ Av. There's one key difference between those topics, and that's this line at the end of the most recent thread:

Is this an isolated incident, or representative of British Airways' current customer service standards?

This takes the thread from simply being the discussion of an incident to a discussion on the state of BA. Therefore, it's Civil Aviation related. The previous thread you mentioned didn't contain any real direction from the OP to direct the course of the thread, so since it simply relied on being a thread about an incident. Because of that, the moderator in that instance made the decision to move the thread.

unrave wrote:

Expecting a response that is a bit more substantial than 'the mod thought so'.

Believe it or not, we do actually have a rationale behind most of our actions. It's not always entirely clear to users (or sometimes even to us) exactly which forum some threads should exist, because sometimes it could fit in more than one forum. It's all based on how the thread is interpreted, and sometimes disagreement can exist based on different interpretations. In this case, I had a very clear reason for disagreeing with your assessment that the thread should be moved.